Dear Mr. Bretz and Ms. Vanneman,
I’m writing in regards to the TEDxLincoln event you hosted
last week at UNL’s Kimball Hall. It was
my first time attending a TED event in Lincoln
or anywhere else, though I’ve been a fan of TED talks for several years and
have found them both a stimulating source of ideas and a medium perfectly
suited for conveying these ideas in the internet age. It was thus that I was quite excited for last
Thursday’s event.
I enjoyed your selection of speakers very much, particularly
Justin Lepard’s talk on eliminating boundaries in creativity and Rob McEntarffer’s
discussion of education’s focus on superficial rewards. I also applaud your decision to conclude with
Abeny Kucha’s “Only Hope” talk recounting her struggles as a refugee, which ended
the day on a moving, heartfelt, and brutally honest note.
However—and this is the reason I’m writing to you today—I
sincerely felt that the power and value of these ideas was cheapened and
debased by your framing of this event, in particular through the tone set by
your emcee Susan Stibal. Each time she
came onstage I felt patronized by her artificial cheerfulness and insincere
manner of uplifting the crowd, a manner of excessive smiles, lame jokes, and
constant attempts to instill vapid positivity rather than mature thought. Simply put, Ms. Stibal’s manner served not to
enhance the ideas we were hearing onstage, but to distract us from them, giving
her interludes the stilted air of small talk shared with a dental hygienist
before an exam. So committed did Ms.
Stibald seem to her mission of condescension that she cut short the
well-deserved standing ovation to Ms. Kucha’s talk by retaking the stage far
too soon, and her childish humor reached its peak earlier in the program when
she clutched her hip onstage in mock pain as an exaggerated (and arguably
nonsensical) play off of the word “hiatus.”
My other main complaint involves the way you handled
sponsors and advertising. As a former
marketing representative for a nonprofit, I know how important sponsorship is
for events like TEDxLincoln, and also know that having company names prominently
displayed serves as a powerful motivator when encouraging sponsors to
donate. However, the overt manner in
which you drove the audience’s attention to these sponsors ranks among the most
shameless I’ve ever seen. Not only did
the sponsorship slide serve as a focal centerpiece multiple times during the
event (rather than having these logos placed more tastefully in the background),
but Ms. Stibald actually encouraged us to tweet these sponsors our thanks using
the TED hashtag, thus treating the audience more like word-of-mouth-advertisers
than free-thinking individuals.
The ineffective nature of this ploy can be confirmed by a glance
at the #TEDxLincoln Twitter feed, where none of the sponsors are actually
thanked in this way. When audiences feel
that they’re being coerced into sharing their thoughts on social media, they’re
less likely to share those thoughts at all; such statements feel most genuine
when they emerge organically, creating an atmosphere of open, unadulterated
discussion. The numerous points at which
participants were encouraged to tweet, use hashtags, mention specific sponsors,
and download the Whova app (e-mails for which overcrowded my inbox in the days preceding
the event) only served as a turn-off—the reasons for their frequency were too
obvious. At least when the magician Chase Hasty tricked the crowd into pulling up his Instagram as part of a card
trick, he did so by clearly (and humorously) drawing attention to the cheap
nature of the tactic. Such honesty goes
a long way toward building trust.
TED is a forum for thoughtful, provoking ideas worthy of our
consideration—so act like it! When an
organization resorts to cheap jokes, exaggerated cheer, overemphasis on
decorum, and overt advertising, it forces audiences to take the presenters less
seriously—as if the talks existed in an idealistic fantasy world, while back in
the real world sustained by the emcees, mature adults adhere to the same
middle-class standards of polite behavior that TED is supposed to be
challenging. This is not how you change
the world—this is how you isolate ideas into small chunks without allowing
viewers to follow-up, take action, or ruminate on what they’ve heard.
This is of course not to say that a TED event should be
completely solemn or joke-free; rather, it’s possible to adopt a more mature
approach that’s still personable and even funny. Instead of ensuring that audience members all
have a super-dooper fun time, perhaps next year’s emcees could follow each
speaker with a thoughtful comment, some off-the-cuff discussion, or some way of
relating the talks to the greater world.
Humor in these situations can be an effective and warming part of a
presentation (look at the popularity of David Sedaris, for example), as long as
the emcee’s approach assumes a certain level of intelligence from the audience. No one likes to be talked down to, after all.
To close: your event motto is Re:Think, and I highly suggest
you apply it to the way you present these talks. Because, frankly, it sucks.
Sincerely,
Ian Rogers
